


Ink & Sea

by CrepuscularPetrichor



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:35:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrepuscularPetrichor/pseuds/CrepuscularPetrichor
Summary: A brief, broad look at the lives of a boy with ink-stained fingers and a man who smelled like the sea.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Ink & Sea

When he was a boy, Ben always had ink-stained fingers. His father’s stress on education meant Ben was always writing, always splattering dark India ink across pages and pages of Latin and Greek. The effort got him in to Yale, got him to a place where he spent four more years watching the deep black seep between the whorls of his fingerprints. When Ben was young, he threw rocks through Yale’s windows, threw stones with his friend Nathan, who he didn’t know would die in a few short years. When they talked of revolution, when they spoke of whiggish sympathies and exhorted new ideas like educating women and abolishing slavery, Ben got so fired up that ink sprayed across the page, stained parchment with his vehement opinions. Ben didn’t know Nathan would die in the war; if he had, would he have encouraged him to join the revolution? 

If Nathan hadn’t joined, Nathan would not have volunteered to spy for Washington. Nathan should never have volunteered to spy for Washington; he was a schoolteacher and a soldier, not a spy. None of the soldiers were spies; one couldn’t be a spy and maintain one’s honor. So Nathan, who cared less for honor than for the endless drive to do things, went across the sound, went into New York while it was burning. And Nathan, not a spy, was fooled, and hanged, when Ben had only just joined up himself, that summer. And they said he was brave, they said he died with composure, they said he quoted Cato, which sounded like something Nathan would do, and how could Ben have let that happen? But if Nathan hadn’t died, would Ben have found himself so adamant to seek a better way? For there must be a better way of spying than sending twenty-one year old schoolteachers off to die, than sending Ben’s friend off, because Nathan had been antsy, like when they’d thrown rocks through Yale’s windows. But if Nathan hadn’t died, Ben wouldn’t have tried to find a better way, and if Ben hadn’t tried to find a better way, he wouldn’t have had cause to reacquaint himself with Caleb. 

Caleb was a man already by the time he went to sea. Nineteen, no longer a boy, no longer constrained to that town just on the edge of the water. Not tied to the apple orchard that overlooked the bay, to the coves and inlets and rocky outcrops that made up Long Island’s shore. By the time he came back, the sea was in him. He’d been living on it near a decade, near as long as he could remember, because he had only the kinds of memories of home that keep you sane when you’re away too long, and need to have a place to go back to. But when he came back, the war called, the way it called every man in those days. And for years his fellow man had been his only company, his one defense against the brute strength of nature, but now Caleb was in the unfamiliar position of fighting against men with many arms and guns and minds. And few men turned out to be much more than beasts in Caleb’s estimation, but Ben was such a one. 

During the war, Ben wrote endless correspondence. He compiled letter after letter, transcribed, made copies, wrote reports and many evenings found his fingertips once more stained black. Caleb sailed many times across the sound. He visited those coves and inlets, those secret places he had taken such pains, as a youth, to explore. He came back from Setauket with the smell of the sea in his hair and in his clothes and in his skin. And of a quiet evening you could find Ben laying trails of ink stains across the sea salt scent of Caleb. 

Sometimes instead of ink, Ben’s skin was stained with blood. Sometimes, instead of salt and swells, Caleb smelled of gunpowder. 

But all things must end, and thank God that rang true for battles, for daily death tolls and watching the men around you succumb to frostbite or smallpox more frequently than musket or bayonet. At the end of the war, Ben found his way into Connecticut, into Congress, into work and duty and responsibility. Family came along with that, his wife the daughter of a Major General and signer of the Declaration. And though there were always endless papers, somehow the ink stayed on the page more often than it clung to his fingertips. When it did, he would look out into the middle distance and remember the days in Setauket, the days at Yale, the days of Revolution. Those memories grew more vivid in the springtime, when the smoke of chimney fires was gradually replaced by the smell of rain and life beginning again. 

Caleb found his way back to the water, to a little place outside a seaside town, on the edge of a cove. A place whence he could see, on clear days, the outline of Long Island on the horizon. After all his time away, his yearning to seek beyond the sound for his adventures, Caleb settled where he could keep an eye on Setauket without leaving home. When they built the lighthouse on Fayerweather Island, they built with rocks that glistened with the shine of crystals, once they’d seen a rising tide retreat. Ben would probably know their proper names, from his fancy desk in his ostentatious house in his town inland, where he made deals and wrote letters and never spoke a word about their duties in the war. Ben may have known how to write of stones like these in Latin or in Greek, but he couldn’t see them, the way Caleb saw things come out of the water gleaming, as if made new. 

After a little time, for how much can one man really ask, Ben was laid out stiff in a white tomb above the ground, where stones and flags marked rigid rows around him. He rests still in the sepulcher of a man who made much of his life, and was buried in a manner befitting his station. He managed to retain his honor by hiding the truth of things. 

Caleb’s stone is near-illegible, but it is propped up these days by flowers and painted rocks and thanks and love for the services he rendered, though they lay quietly undiscovered for many years. Caleb’s grave is in a rambling cemetery, with collapsing stones, daily visited by birds and squirrels and deer, and under that ground he goes slowly back to the earth. 

Now, no one knows them as they were. We learn their names, recite a laundry list of their achievements, we try to tell their unknown stories. But they were more than letters, more than codes and bravery and duty and bloodshed. But now, no one remembers the boy with ink-stained fingers, or the man who smelled like the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this sitting by Ben's tomb, after having visited his post-war home and Caleb's home site (no extant dwelling, unfortunately) and grave. Reflecting on how differently the two men were perceived in life vs. how they are now treated in death & other such morbid curiosities.  
> Did not do much additional research so it is definitely all opinionated fiction.


End file.
